More about my creativity
If somewhere a line stops, somewhere else one starts
©AC
Playing outside as a child was one of my greatest pleasures. I loved to oberserve the different animals when visiting a local Zoo and follow their body curves with lines. Later as an adult I would scribble fantasy figures on the back of notepads when there was downtime at my job as a telephone operator.
When I was 30 I started to paint more often in my spare time. While traveling I drew objects, people and landscapes. At home I had a 2 meter high painting board attached to the kitchen wall. I had fixed on it a large white paper.
My initial improvisations showed chaos. What I saw before me frightened me. It was rediscovering my feelings that had been buried in me for years. With drawing and painting I offered them a space to express themselves. Finally, something began to breathe, to move, to relax in me, this inner fog dissolved, my view became clearer.
After a couple of months I put the paintbrush aside. I wanted to express myself differently and the previous papers felt too big. Now picking up a black felt tip pen, I chose to express myself in a smaller format.
During this time I attended art courses in the Rote Fabrik in Zurich. With Sirpa Suhner I got to know "anthroposophic painting with watercolors".
During my training as a painting therapist, we students immersed ourselves in the world of colors, forms and feelings. We tried things out, always had new tasks to solve, opened our hearts and left behind unusual colorful pictures on the painting walls. In the first year we were supposed to do something creative every day, I decided to continue experimenting with lines.
In 2005 I opened my own painting studio, where young and old visited me. Some of them later became artists themselves, others processed so their biographies, others sought comfort in drawing and painting when serious illnesses afflicted them, still others came here for fun, to be themselves and occasionally to dismantle the prejudice "you cant paint or I can't paint". Yes, it takes courage to try something new. I observed with joy many young and older people walking out of the studio with a smile after one or two hours painting.
How i create my line drawings
I sit down, stop thinking, put a black feltpen in my hand and the hand starts moving in a continuous line on the paper, sometimes i add colors. Each drawing is different.
Why lines fascinate me
During my Life, i have started watching other Lines appearing , in fotography, in nature, in the sky, in bodies , in faces, animals, calligraphy, birds, in shades, in music, in dance, in architecture, in poems, in stories, in traces of the ancient worlds, in songs, in body paintings and in so much more.
Everytime i sit down and start a linestory, i feel myself breathing more, relaxing more into the moment, forgetting what is around me .
Observing Lines, does something to the brain and the muscles. I had once a tetraplegic came to draw in the clinic artstudio. We made a special tool for him so he cook hold it in deformed hand. He first followed with his eyes the curves of the body of a deer standing in nature, on a picture displayed on the table. After a while, he tried to copy it by drawing the lines he could remember .
Later he told me that for the first time he could feel later one of his fingers again. What a miracle.